Well, Barry came yesterday to get that '39 CE frame, eng, trans and rear-end...I wish I'd had the digital camera out there to take pics...but he had such a bad day, I'd hate to torment him with photographic memories of it.
Seems he had an uneventful trip from Houston to Elgin but 5 miles form my house, he blew a new, double-clamped lower rad hose off the Ford van and it instantly overheated. (bad juju #1).
Luckily, he was still in the little town, so he said he'd let it cool off, reclamp the hose and fill it back up and be along shortly. I waited a while and was just starting to worry when he called back and said he'd obviously taken a wrong turn after leaving town (bad juju #3) and it had overheated again. He was only about 2 miles form the house by now so I filled a couple of 5 gallons cans with water and took them to him.
I got there and he was sitting on the trailer, watching the birds circle overhead while they tried to figure out what was pumping all those steam clouds into the air. We poured all ten gallons of water into that thing...with it belching geysers back out that seemed to be
1/2 water and 1/2 oil (bad juju #4).I mean, he had oil all over the front end, and if Gord had been here, he'd have mistakenly thought a 'gusher' had come in at the wellhead!
We limped it on to my house and within that two miles, it was erupting like Mt St. Helens again. He parked it next to the house and we attempted to cool it down using a hose and copious amounts of water over the radiator. No way was that thing going to cool down while it was still running...it obviously had blown a head gasket and was pumping through the radiator.
Anyway, we shut it off to give it time to settle and hope it didn't sink into the quagmire we had created underneath it. I don't think I'll have any weeds in the driveway in that spot for quite a while!
He scrounged through the scrapyard in the "back 40" and found a rear door for his van...seems it had come open as he was leaving the station in Elgin after his first overheating incident and the trailer crunched it when he made his first turn back onto the highway! (bad juju #5)
After yanking the old frame out of the weeds with my trusty old Ford tractor, we got his van and trailer started and jockied ito position to use my handy-dandy, new electric winch to pull the frame onto his trailer. Nuh-uh! the winch decided it would rather drag my Ford SuperCrew toward the trailer than to haul that frame with the front spindles digging into the dirt onto the trailer (bad juju #6). I guess the overload shutoff circuit inside the winch decided "screw ya both...it's too hot to screwing around with this", so it shut off and poor Barry had to winch it up by hand crank on this trailer winch.
Just so there is no confusion as to the truth...and to further torment Barry, up walks JT...grinning and laughing at Barry, using the hand crank to winch it a foot at a time. OF course, it didn't want to go on the trailer straight, so Barry would winch it a foot or so, then pry it over at the rear to get it straight; then winch it another 18" or so, then pry it over again.
The temp had dropped to about 90 degrees out there by then and the wind was blowing enough to keep me, Trish and JT cool as we sat on my tailgate and watched Barry sweat and finally winch that rusty hulk up all the way up onto his trailer. WHEW!! We were ALL pooped by then!
The rest of the long story is that Barry and JT headed into town to get a bite to eat while I tried in vain to get hold of my son to take care of hauling the last of the furniture out of his apartment. I was still waiting for him to call when they returned with a friend of Barry's from Houston that had driven up to help.
They tried again to get Barry's van to hold water (no F'n way!) so Barry finally decided to park his van, move the trailer to the friend's truck and get on back to Houston and HOPEFULLY return to get the van. Please God, let it be true! :)
I thought I was getting RID of crap around here!! Instead, I now have Barry's van parked where the CE frame had been and the only thing I got rid of was a rear door to replace the crunched one on a Ford van that's now sitting out back!
I did have a fun time recounting all this for you guys. I hope you're enjoying it...I know Barry sure didn't have much fun, even if JT and I had several good laughs. It's hard to laugh at a guy's misfortune...but it sure is more fun than having it happen TO ME the way it normally does!
Bob (anybody need some Ford van parts? I seem to have a new addition to the scrap yard fleet!)